For myself I would like to see as much live updating in inkscape as possible. The more visual feedback the user gets, the more fluid the app will feel. If using an effect were like compiling a program, then: no, you wouldn't want to update every time you change a line of code. Compiling is slow, and the intermediate results are completely useless. However, we're trying to help te user be artistic. Effects generally run quite quickly, and the intermediate results are often useful in helping the user find the magic combination of parameters that create just the right effect.
Live updating needn't make inkscape feel slow if: 1. script threads run at low/medium a priority so the rest of the app/system don't lock up. 2. script execution is quickly aborted if the user changes a parameter, or presses cancel.
On a connected topic: would it be worth adding some kind of optional progress API to the python set? This way potentially long running scripts can give some feedback as to the percentage progress that has been made. I think this could be useful when doing live preview, or when doing the final render. Otherwise a script is rather like the Turing Machine; you never whether to give up waiting.
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From: "bulia byak" <buliabyak@...400...> Sent: 03 July 2007 10:35 To: "Ted Gould" <ted@...11...> Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Script Updates
On 7/3/07, Ted Gould wrote:
Well, I challenged whether this is required in a previous e-mail, and you didn't respond. So I assumed that you thought my logic was flawless :)
It's not about logic. It's about "feel" if you like, about perception and doing what is expected. If I have a dialog with several parameters, and you set them in turn, you are not interested in seeing the result after only one parameter is set. But once you set the first parameter, you see something changing on your canvas and you waste your time trying to figure out what happened. This is annoying and wasteful (although, of course, in another situation where I want to fine-tune the parameters, it's a huge time saver).
On Tue, 2007-07-03 at 11:05 -0700, joel@...1709... wrote:
On a connected topic: would it be worth adding some kind of optional progress API to the python set? This way potentially long running scripts can give some feedback as to the percentage progress that has been made. I think this could be useful when doing live preview, or when doing the final render. Otherwise a script is rather like the Turing Machine; you never whether to give up waiting.
Well, yes. But, I'd like to find a way to implement this in Inkscape proper -- and I'm not sure how to do that with the scripting interface. I think it'd be a shame to require GTK bindings for every possible scripting language.
I agree on this from the usability perspective though. I think the "working" dialog that now comes up helps a ton. Especially with cancel.
--Ted
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Ted Gould